Various heat transfer recording methods have been known so far. Among these methods, dye diffusion transfer recording systems attract attention as a process that can produce a color hard copy having an image quality closest to that of silver halide photography (see, for example, “Joho Kiroku (Hard Copy) to Sono Zairyo no Shintenkai (Information Recording (Hard Copy) and New Development of Recording Materials)” published by Toray Research Center Inc., 1993, pp. 241-285; and “Printer Zairyo no Kaihatsu (Development of Printer Materials)” published by CMC Publishing Co., Ltd., 1995, p. 180). Moreover, this system has advantages over silver halide photography: it is a dry system, it enables direct visualization from digital data, it makes reproduction simple, and the like.
In this dye diffusion transfer recording system, a heat-sensitive transfer sheet (hereinafter also referred to as an ink sheet) containing dyes is superposed on a heat-sensitive transfer image-receiving sheet (hereinafter also referred to as an image-receiving sheet), and then the ink sheet is heated by a thermal head whose exothermic action is controlled by electric signals, in order to transfer the dyes contained in the ink sheet to the image-receiving sheet, thereby recording an image information. Three colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow, are used for recording a color image by overlapping one color to other, thereby enabling transferring and recording a color image having continuous gradation for color densities.
As a polymer for a receptor layer which is acting as dye receptor in the outermost layer of a heat-sensitive transfer image-receiving sheet, polyester resins, polycarbonate resins, vinyl chloride resins and the like are conventionally used. In recent years, improvements of printing speed have been progressing, but, with using these resins, it is difficult to achieve both high speed printing (transferring) and excellent photographic properties, such as transfer sensitivity and image preservability, at the same time.
Polymers having a specific structure have been proposed (see, for example, JP-A-2-265789 (“JP-A” means unexamined published Japanese patent application) or JP-A-8-224967). However, they have not reached sufficient levels yet, and further improvement has been desired.